And during this 48-hour period, the hacker gang “Lizard Squad” has been tweeting incessantly, announcing every time one of the networks goes down and asking for Twitter follows, favourites, and retweets to restore service. In fact, one Lizard Squad Twitter account has grown from under 30,000 followers on Wednesday to more than 150,000 followers on Friday.

Sony and Microsoft have both been very responsive on Twitter, but they have only mentioned “network issues.” They have not confirmed that these outages are the result of DDoS attacks, online or to Business Insider.

A separate hacker group, called “The Finest Squad,” is trying to offset these attacks by DDoSing Lizard Squad’s own servers to stop these attacks at the source. But The Finest Squad has also complained that Sony and Microsoft aren’t doing enough to protect their own servers.

Call Xbox Live and PSN and tell them FinestSquad says “Upgrade your firewall and put a filter on traffic to their servers”.#ProblemSolved
— Finest (@TheFinestSquad) December 25, 2014

It isnt our fault Xbox and Playstation refused to take advice from us. We had yesterday on lockdown. If anyone is a let down its them.
— Finest (@TheFinestSquad) December 25, 2014

PSN servers are completely off. No we cant even monitor them. WTF are they doing.@PlayStation yall are fuck what happend.
— Finest (@TheFinestSquad) December 26, 2014

Sony and Microsoft are scrambling to protect their networks from these constant attacks — but it sounds like both networks need a security upgrade. In an interview with WinBeta, Lizard Squad said Microsoft has “almost nothing” in terms of security, and even though Sony apparently upgraded its security recently, it only took “a bit of time to work around.”

We’re continuing to reach out to Sony and Microsoft and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

NOW WATCH: Tech Insider videos

Want to read a more in-depth view on the trends influencing Australian business and the global economy? BI / Research is designed to help executives and industry leaders understand the major challenges and opportunities for industry, technology, strategy and the economy in the future. Sign up for free at research.businessinsider.com.au.